Fitness For Freedom Tips

Fitness For Freedom Tips is a new type of fitness and health show. We deliver fitness tips that you can apply to your life right away in 10 minutes or less. Lets face it you’re busy and life pulls you in all directions. You want to be healthier, but living a healthier lifestyle is hard. It requires you to change and there is a lot of misinformation out there. We work hard to syphon through it to give you the most sound advice possible and set you up for the greatest chance of success.
Jonathan Chant has been working with people to live healthier lives for 10 years now and he’s seen it all. That’s why he founded Fitness For Freedom, your complete online fitness training and lifestyle design community. He pulls out all the stops to help you make the changes yourself. No transformation challenges, no extreme changes just solid strategies to help you make changes that will stick for the rest of your life.
Change is constant and you’re going to have lots of questions as you go along that’s why we keep our episodes short so they don’t ‘eat in’ to your already ‘stretched’ lives (puns intended).
We try to have some fun with it too!
Exercise doesn’t have to be boring?
So what are you waiting for? If you’re still reading this you’re definitely interested in the show, so give it a listen.

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In Episode 31 we talked about why the fat burning zone is your worst zone to burn fat in from a purely physiological perspective and in today’s episode we’re going to get into the 3 lesser known reasons it’s not the best zone to exercise in and only one of them has anything to do with physiology.

This is our first ever video podcast. We’ve talked about the different types of contractions and today we’re going to show you how to put them all together. This is important if you’re trying to break through a plateau or looking for something a bit different to add variety into your workouts.

When most people think about lifting weight, this is the part they usually focus on, the actual lifting part.Doing a concentric contraction means you have to produce more force than the resistance offers to overcome the weight and lift it, doing repetitions of it is what makes you stronger.

Intrinsic goals are goals that we set for internal purposes or intrinsic motivation, like building relationships, developing a personal skill or giving back to a community, for no other reason than to get the warm and fuzzies inside or the sense of accomplishment and pride of doing something challenging that you set out to do.

Extrinsic goals are goals that we set for external purposes or external motivation. Like money, high praise or trophies. They are are often driven by fear of loss or for the external accolades we receive from other people. A perfect example of this in the fitness industry is the before and after picture as a marketing tool.

One of my client’s has a brother and for the sake of this story we’ll call him Mike. Mike is a DJ and he spends most of his time working in clubs, restaurants and doing special events which usually go late into the night. He’s been doing this for over 20 years and has very much adapted to this lifestyle. For the last few years Mike has been getting increasingly more tired, he no longer has as much energy for his gigs and then for some reason he can’t sleep as well even though he’s tired at the end of the night.He attribute’s this to the fact that he’s getting older, he’s in his early 50’s after all and maybe all these late nights are starting to catch up with him.

I’m not 100% sure where this came from or what research study was cited as the original to say this, but the theory goes like this, eating carbohydrates aka. sugar causes your insulin to go up and if your glycogen stores are full, which they are all the time in most people, excluding very athletic individuals, then this gets stored as fat on your body. The theory is this, if you go to bed after consuming these sugars, then you go to bed with high blood sugar which means your body is much more likely to store it as fat because you’re not moving.

To talk about each of these strategies we need to start with a story about Beth. Beth is of course a fictional character but if you’re like most people you at least recognize some aspects of her life in your own. So here are some strategies that you can use in this situation that you might find helpful.

Once you've decided that there is a personal trainer or strength coach that you would like to work with based on education, experience, personality and all the other things we talked about in yesterday’s episode, then you should look for this type of process to decide whether or not they're a good trainer for you.

We work really hard to try and guide you and get you exercising in a way that works for you, but sometimes you just need the guidance of a professional to show you how to exercise, so today we’re going to cover what you should be looking for when trying to find the right personal trainer or coach for you.

If you like our free checklist of what to look for when hiring a personal trainer, please click here and then scroll to the bottom of the post. We'll deliver the checklist right to your inbox just moments later.

There are two type’s of people that say they exercise every day. The first is someone that wakes up every morning and does 100 push-ups or a 100 sit-ups or something like that, I have never met anyone like this in real life I have only seen them in movies, I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m just saying I’ve never met them in real life. However they would be able to strength train like this for one of two reasons, one they either rotate between exercises everyday like do push-ups one day, pull-ups another day and sit-ups the next day.

The first thing I want to pick apart is this notion of good fat and bad fat, there’s really no such thing as good fat and bad fat, our body needs fat to survive, which means there are fats we should eat more of, fats we should eat less of and there is one type of fat we should never eat, so I guess this would be the bad one and it’s called trans fat. But we’ll get to that one last.

Alright I get it, sometimes vegetables can be boring, I mean how many carrot sticks and pieces of celery can we eat, we’re not rabbits. Sometimes you just might crave something that’s a bit salty or sweet and vegetables don’t cut it and that’s fine, you don’t need to eat all vegetables all the time, you just need to eat more.So here are some strategies I’ve used with clients or I myself use, to get the job done.

The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries is a business book that I read 2 years ago, but the principles he teaches in this book can be extracted into health, wellness and fitness. Before I get into it I want to give you some background, Ries had several failed tech start-ups and this was his mind set for each company.

Isometric strength training is definitely non-traditional, it is a way to strengthen your muscles without actually moving them.This means contracting or flexing your muscles without moving any part of your body.

There are a lot of people in this world and I think for the most part we are all chasing the same thing and that is to be happy and be healthy, at the end of the day if you’re both of those things you’re doing alright.

But back to your question David, if you’re building a home gym you need to look at your goals and what you already have in your house to decide what type of equipment you need. If your goal is to just be a healthier person, remain independent and make activities that require effort much easier you don’t need to purchase any equipment.

Ok, having this skin or adipose tissue that hangs over the front of your mid-section is really common after pregnancy and sometimes it can be made worse by the scar of a c-section, making it uneven. Because fat does not form the same way under scar tissue or over your muscle that has been literally cut, it can make it look even more uneven or a bit ‘extra hangy’. Even if you lose weight it still won’t be as ‘tight’ looking as the other parts of your body.

For the most part these videos are really good, Fitness Blender is probably the current marketplace leader on youtube, and they’ve built a massive following, they make the world a healthier place. But if you’re trying to change your body composition, doing these follow along videos will only take you so far.

Variety just means different ways of training, of course you have variety between exercise types whether you’re doing cardiovascular training, strength training or mobility training, but there are also several different ways you can add variety into each of these training modalities.

An account-i-billi-buddy is someone you not only exercise with but also talk to about exercise philosophies, you lean on each other when one of you doesn’t feel like working out, you spot each other and offer each other encouragement to make sure you’re getting maximum effort out of your fitness routine. Also, there is strength in numbers and having someone to lean on to help you figure this stuff out can be really helpful especially if you’re nervous about taking your first exercise steps. Simply put an account-i-billi-buddy is someone you exercise with, but in order to have a successful relationship with this person you need to make sure it’s a right fit for both of you, so these are some things you need to look for in a person you want to exercise with.

Going to the gym has a lot of great benefits, they have lots of equipment and weights, it’s easier to get into the frame of mind to exercise, sometimes you meet friends and have groups of people that are trying to overcome some of the same challenges you face.

When most people think of flexibility they think of their ability to touch their toes, which probably comes from high school gym class because that was the test for flexibility, but flexibility is so much more than that, it’s your ability to reach behind you or to reach low enough to pick something up off the ground without hurting your back.Flexibility and mobility go hand in hand because you want to be able to move well and this goes beyond being able to touch your toes because you need to move all the parts off your body, your shoulders, ankles, hips, wrists and your neck.If you’re going to stay functional good mobility is required through all your joints not just your lower back.